Another promising work is Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Totem” (2010), a gypsum tower that records visitors’ conversations and spits them out in fragmented form over the course of the exhibition. Unfortunately, the fragments of speech returned by the sculpture feel so random — and are so hard to hear — that the piece fails to connect human speech, meaning and technology in a profound fashion.

A few events coming up worth noting. This friday 8pm – midnight there will be a rebroadcast of Future Archaeology‘s audience participatory performance of Ohm at the Index Festival. You can catch it on TV Time Warner channel 57 or join us at the rebroadcast party (same time) at Silvershed 119 w. 25th st. PH in Manhattan.

Sept. 1st at noon I will be discussing my work at an art salon benefit for Grounds for Sculpture in NJ. The tickets are $60 and include a fancy lunch and glass of wine. Call (609) 586-0616 for tickets. This is also pretty much your last chance to see Totem (who has been evolving all summer) installed at Grounds for Sculpture as the exhibit comes down shortly after on 9/18.

Jaaga Dhvani is a new work of Sound Art by New York-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Jaaga Dhvani is quite literally the voice of a space – a sonic representation of the Jaaga art center imagined as a living corporeal entity.

Jaaga Dhvani is also a voice from space – the space around us in both our immediate and vast conceptions of place; an exploration of Jaaga , Bangalore, and India more generally as a site of collision between the global and the local, the high and the low tech, the very old and the very new.

Here are a few verses the algorithm generated today. I especially enjoy the first one as two of my good friends are getting married today in California (congrats Dan and Ellie! sorry it’s not more upbeat…)

joyously the bridal garland
perish too thy hated name and
warlike steed and throw the dart
dear in joy and part in silence

and their faces ran with blood of
earth loving sons your virtues prove
arjun and on kuru’s king and
lost him to restore the kingdom

larger stouter is this kuru
bowing to her weeping sister
bright celestial cars in concourse
lightninglike it came on karna

render honour to thy king and
lost himself and all was still and
torn not the deep and deadly sound
heaving sobs convulsed her bosom

Dr. Steven Kurtz, the artist accused by the US Department of Justice of “bioterrorism” stemming from his use of scientific materials in his award-winning art practice, joins Eugene Thacker and George Annas for a panel discussion on the ethics of scientific and creative research and freedom of speech, moderated by science writer Carl Zimmer, with an introduction by Amanda McDonald Crowley.